Sacrament
Dave Motes
for Mike
The phone hammered me awake, twitched and wondering if it had been real, then rang again, now to the fear that a late call squeezes from your gut. The clock mocked midnight. It was the boss.
“Johnny--you’ve got a trip tomorrow.”
“Kelly, what the hell--I’m off three straight.”
“You’re on the schedule. Last I heard you were whining. It’s money in the bank. Extra, actually. Go back to bed. I’ll call you at 5, make sure you’ve got your ass in a forward gear.”
“Better be a good rod. I’m tired of this rookie crap.”
He’d already said, “Get some sleep,” and hung up. Kelly never said goodbye.
Four came early. Out of pride I was up for the call, tried to sound peppy. I’d been guiding the river almost ten years but this was my first year with Kelly’s outfit; I wanted to stay on his good side, if there was one, which if there was I hadn’t seen yet.
I’d tied up with Kelly just in time. The dam and droughts and whirling disease had cut bookings down, and if I’d been running independent I might have had some trouble making it. Kelly’s reputation kept the clients coming through the early season and now, with fishing solid and a little more water making it down the river, we could put people on fish steadily. It also helped that Kelly had most of a lock on a pair of prime stretches of river.
As it always was with guiding, we were riding a curve. It hurts your reputation if you aren’t booked up, but a reputation for being booked up cuts into the bookings when you aren’t. Until the word got out that we were doing well, people wouldn’t want to fish; when the word got out, they’d assume we were booked. Between a rock and a blowdown. Not a situation when you leave a client hanging.
I was groggy and thick with fatigue. Three straight trips, and not easy ones. The weather had been blustery and the rods iffy, but everybody had caught fish and a few nice ones, I’d rowed a boat a million miles and hauled it out and dumped it back a dozen times. But really it wasn’t the physical labor that got me; it was the smiling and talking. I didn’t yet have reputation enough to be a surly quirky character so I had to smile and smile and talk and talk.
The weather was steady, the rent was due. Up and at ‘em.
I zombied through my routine. Kelly called again just about at 5:40, just about takeoff time, and told me the client was running late. And he had another gem of information.
“He wants to run the upper river. And from Step Bend, not Ugly’s.”
“What the hell is that?” I said.
Kelly paused, I replied for myself. “I know, I know, doesn’t matter. But we can’t get in to Step Bend.”
“He can. He greased it in somehow. I told him lower river’s fishing better, he didn’t care. I guess he’s been up here before.”
“Who is this guy? Somebody you know?”
“Nope. It’s ok. He’s paying.” I heard the laugh in his voice.
“Is he paying me?” I asked.
“Yeah, he’s paying you. Just row the boat, rook.”
“I’ve been...never mind,” I said to the air.
Like all solo work, guiding’s got its core of passion, but work is work. For me it’s a sequence of routines. Fishing is easy; I rarely have anything to say that’s going to change much about the fishing beyond the obvious things, like having a bunch of flies and keeping the clients from drowning. So it’s mainly a matter of not forgetting things. Check with anybody: most lousy trips are lousy because somebody forgot something. For me the key moment is the pause just after I’ve started the truck. I sit there breathing coffee and go over everything, head to feet, bow to stern, put-in to takeout, and if I’ve forgotten something, I remember it then.
This morning was off. I was preoccupied by fatigue, by phone calls.
And by a different stretch of river. Since the dam went in on the east branch, we’ve had lovely cold water steady through the hot season. It made good to great flows over twenty miles from the confluence on down. In the old days it was the upper creeks that fished well, but they were skinny. Big trout were rare, but fishing was solid, a perfect beginner’s creek.
The dam project had worried everybody. The usual suspicion of government, generally warranted, was ramped up by the ranchers and their water greed. But the feds came through. The project delivered good water quality, and the state got it ruled catch-and-release barbless fly fishing only. It was tailrace fishing, but as a guide I couldn’t complain. We could put people on fish every day of the year, usually on bugs, with big brown trout to keep the trophy hunters happy. Many of our clients didn’t even know that they weren’t fishing a free-flowing river. They saw us in one of the glossies and put their charge cards down. And it was a lovely river. So I was guiding regular, living on the thing I loved, and overlooking the nuances. Upper stretch? Fine with me.
Head to toe, bow to stern, put-in to caddis-choked dusk. Satisfied that all was right and ready, I rolled her down the driveway into a sunrise the exact inexpressible color of a big rainbow’s gillplate.
The other guides were gone upriver by 6:30, dragging hangovers and glossy boats, clients perched alertly in passenger seats. I was dozing on the verandah when the luxury rental rolled up at about 7:10 and two guys stretched out.
The driver looked like a driver, not a man with the juice to get Duffy to let somebody across his pastures into Step Bend. He was a bulky 25 or so, uncomfortable in khakis and a polo shirt. The other one was right on: an athletic and tanned thirty who showed power and money just getting out of a Town Car. I walked down the steps and into my guide smiling face, but they turned away from me and looked into the back seat at a disordered pile of gear and clothing as if they expected me to tote it someplace.
Then they were opening the back doors and the pile of gear and clothing became an old man, slouched and stooped. I stopped and they talked in murmurs from both doors. Movement, helping, more words, and I felt myself step back a bit as the old man unfolded himself in front of me.
First of all, he was big, maybe 6-6 even leaning, shoulders slotted, looking up at me. Second, he wasn’t old. He was gaunt, not thin. His skin and flesh had a falling, wasted look that caused my breath to hitch. To my continued astonishment he laughed, and spoke in a voice that was still big and wide and authoritative.
“Don’t worry son, I won’t die on you. Or if I do, it’s not your problem. Just take me fishing.”
“Yes, sir,” I heard myself say.
Most of the time in the outdoors we’re insulated from the weak, the young, the dying. The strenuous steps that define fishing and hunting and river games keep them home. No mothers with children, not many women at all; few kids, except for the pissy teenagers dragged out to bond with disappointed dads. It’s a healthy person’s game--physically healthy, anyway. Probably why we don’t catch many sick fish--the sick fish aren’t biting, and the sick folks aren’t fishing.
Not today.
The front-seat two orbited him as he hauled himself up the stairs and into the shop. If Kelly was surprised he didn’t show it. We did the paperwork and walked out of the store. No license, no new jacket, no handful of superfluous flies, no “Tanner River Guide Service” hat. He signed, he walked. We got his gear loaded--a bulky bag and a cane rod uncased in hand--and mounted up.
“It’s just you, then?” I asked him.
“Hell yes, just me. My son Kyle there, he’s not interested in trout. At the moment he’s interested in mortality. He thinks I’m going to die out there today. My name is Andy, by the way.” We shook on it, I said, “Johnny,” we left them all behind.
“Are you?” I asked, as we rolled out onto Highway 6.
“Am I what?” he said in that big impatient voice.
“You know, uh,” I replied. “Is there any medical stuff I should know? I mean, pardon my asking, but we’re going to run a lot of very empty landscape today. I gotta know how you’re doing.”
“I’m dying, but not today. I’ll give you the cellular level briefing later, but it’s not as bad as it looks, except for being terminal. I’m just beat down at the moment, need some sun and space.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, leaning into a bend in the road. I wasn’t smiling, and I wasn’t tired anymore.
We drop our vehicles at the launch--dump and hump, we call it--and Kelly has a pair of shop rats round up the vehicles and shuttle them to the takeout. Some of the guides resisted leaving their rides parked in remote areas much of the day, but I didn’t mind. My truck wasn’t worth cracking; I just remembered not to leave flyrods or cases of beer visible. It was just stuff, and it was insured.
My aging drift-boat was another matter. It wasn’t valuable, but I loved it. I’d had it nine years, and somebody else a dozen or more before that. “Its provenance was questionable” was how it had been explained to me when I paid a paltry sum for it, dented and misused but sound and beautiful mahogany jointure. Over the years I’d gradually revised the entire boat and kept it in good trim but it was dowdy and heavy next to the Clackas and Jordans the other guides--just about everybody, it seems--was pulling these days. But I trusted it. The boat rode well and it was paid for. Clients neither knew nor cared.
We rode in silence the twenty miles up to Step Bend. I spent the time reviewing the float trip in my head. I’d drifted the stretch a year before with other guides, taking turns on the sticks. The East Fork of the Tanner rose in the high country and gathered half a dozen sizable spring flows at the head of the valley, going rather suddenly from creek to floatable river. Even so it had a series of skinny gravel riffles and tight bends to contend with. Step Bend was a sharp turn at the foot of a steep cliff of graduated sandstone, weathered into nearly perfect stairs; it was owned by a rancher named Kill Duffy who had closed it to us and everybody else during some pissing match with the BLM. Duffy was an irascible old coot--that is, a typical older gentleman for the region--and he held a grudge. Too bad for us. He owned the perfect put-in on the East Fork for a nine-mile float through gorgeous and mostly inaccessible water. Seven miles down was Ugly’s, a big ratty kind of commune-ranch which we used as a put-in by the kind of private arrangement Kelly had hoped he could maintain with Duffy. The West Fork was steady and fishing well, so we usually ran an eight-mile stretch of the main stem from a private access on the Standard Ranch down to the public landing just across the road from the shop, and occasionally put in at Ugly’s and drifted a mile of east branch and six miles of main stem and took out at Standard.
The West Branch produced a terrific crop of energetic 12 to 18 inch rainbows and occasional brownies, mostly on typical Western hatches anchored in caddis, stones, and calendar hatches of the sexier ephemera. The East Fork was the same with a broader but thinner hatch range, more brownies, and occasional cutthroat influence in the upper areas though it had been years since anybody’d caught a pure cutt.
I was interested to see the reception we’d get from Mr. Duffy, but the gate gaped an inch with the open padlock hanging pointedly from the hasp--no scowling rancher nearby. We bumped over the quarter mile to the creek access, dropped the boat and gear on the gravel bar, and then I ran the truck and trailer back to the gate and left it on the roadside and carefully re-locked the gate.
When I came to the creekbank my client was asleep on a little nest of inflatable pillows in the prow of the boat. I never wondered if he was dead. There was something alive in that waning face in the angled morning light. His rod lay unassembled, still in rubber bands. I couldn’t quite read the make or the lines of the rod but it looked old and clean, a handsome dark finish on the cane and a well-worn old-fashioned-looking cork seat with brass fittings. The reel was also unknown, a small chunky bar-stock profile but with odd oval ports and bone or ivory knobs.
“Approve?” he asked me suddenly. He hadn’t moved but his eyes were open.
“Don’t know yet, until I see it work. It’s a handsome rod. You going to rig it up? We’ve got some real good water right here,” I said.
“Just push her off, John. I’m doing about all I can right now. Blowing up these little pillows took it out of me. Kyle’s a smart kid, how do you like that? A dozen small inflatable pillows. Better not dump this boat or we’ll look like hot chocolate with marshmallows.”
So off we went into the humid June, bugs building in the sun-streaks and just enough breeze to wobble the cottonwood leaves. I saw risers on every corner and streak.
He read my mind again: “Don’t worry about it. Just keep us rolling. I’ll fish when I fish. Don’t matter when we come in. Hell, if we stay long past lunch Kyle will have the state police hovering over in a helicopter. Just let her roll down the river.” He arched himself up, head thrown back like a postmodern hood ornament. I let her roll.
It’s a one-boat river, a sweet series of sweeping bends, tight but perfect if the guide has a careful touch and doesn’t mind scuffing bottom here and there. The bends aren’t narrow enough to draw the boat into the bank, and they’re not gradual enough to shallow out. With a pair of active anglers we’d be in and out of the boat all day. Even with nobody fishing I found myself setting the boat up for each curve, holding with long easy pulls so she would back down and slide right or left. I knew I was dropping over the sill of each riffle with no more than an inch under the skids, and took pleasure in the precise control of the boat, using only the water I needed, keeping the deeper, faster flow to the outside, settling past the pockets where the rainbows nymphed, then wagging the stern inward against the slower edge so we pointed through the cut-bank curves like the hand on a clock. I went a mile or so this way before he spoke.
“Nice work.” He’d raised himself up into more of a sitting position, reclining now like a pasha on his pillows. “Very nice work. Kelly said you had the best touch on the oars.”
Privately I doubted Kelly had said any such thing. Compliments, even to clients, were not his style. We sat a moment. I kept setting the boat up for casts that never came.
“I love this river,” he said in a different tone. “I first saw it when I was eleven, which is probably why. I’ve seen greater ones, better fishing ones, more dramatic ones, but I think this one came along and got me when I needed it most. My father brought me up here. He was good that way, gave opportunity, you know. We did well to take them.” He paused, showed no hesitation to tell.
“They didn’t have much time for us, my folks; worked hard at hard jobs, both. What time they had they made use of, you know. We’d go to a baseball game, get the glove and ball, then be on our own, but if it wasn’t enough, or if it didn’t take they’d sort of start from scratch, find a new thing, more and more chances. Not like now. Now we hold the kids’ hands the whole way, make ‘em decide on stuff they can’t understand.
“Music, that was funny. My folks didn’t know a thing about it but one night they bundled us up and went over by the university to some club, threw us into jazz the way you’d throw a kid into a pond, just in case it was the thing for us, for either of us. I remember that we stayed up until midnight, my brother and me, maybe 12 and 10 years old.
“Music didn’t take, but baseball did, both. Football for him, basketball for me. Books and stuff, school, was ok--my sister was the student. We got grades but she was the one who loved it. Then, trout fishing. Fly fishing. Hot damn. I can still remember the moment I put my feet in the river. It wasn’t this one, it was the main river down in town, but it was like I’d been baptized. That cold water, hot on my feet. Both of us, stuck by it...is it stuck, or struck? I don’t know. Hell, both. Stuck, and struck dumb too. From that point on it was central to me.
A long silence, but edgy and dense, muscular.
“My father gave me that. What a gift, you know? He could have sat on the couch and watched baseball. He worked two jobs, mom one, they were tired, but they joyed on our passion for these rivers, the rods, the flies. They considered it—get this—they considered it a big success that we bought in, got in to it. Dad would drive us up here at dawn, hike in, then watch from the shade. He had to be exhausted, but he stayed awake. He told me a few years ago that he took good naps under the tree while we taught ourselves to fly fish, but I remember him awake and nodding me on. God that was a great thing.”
He was perking up, and lifting up too, looking around.
“We first came here on a day of storms. Brought a tarp. Dad had looked at maps, asked somebody permission, and we walked in, maybe a mile, came out down here along Styles Creek. I can still see it. Pewter sky and wind, and bugs, oh my. We caught fish all morning, some were cutthroats--that was, what, early 60’s, still cutthroats then. Something about that experience crystalized in my mind, made itself permanent. I read this poem in college, Wordsworth, all I remember is the river, how he returns to it and watches his sister see it for the first time. That’s this place, to me.”
He craned his head up, looked at me over the oar-handles. “You ok with all this sentimental dying-man shit?” he said in that smiling voice.
He waited a moment as we settled into a meadow run that was heavy with the promise of big hoppers in a month or so. I could almost feel the brownies lurking in the cutbanks, making do on dace and bugs while the kickers got fat on spears of summer grass.
“When I got this thing here”--he made a vague open-handed fingertip gesture at his abdomen-- “I made myself all the usual oaths. I tried to fall back on church, couldn’t without feeling like a hypocrite; I went that way, of course--I think everybody does--but it didn’t do it, or do it all. I pissed in the ear of the VA and my congressman about the chemicals and the studies and the science, of course, threw my weight around. That was all hollow." He stopped, smiling away.
“This is pretty funny. I’ve got therapists, guys with beards and notebooks, and I tell this sad tale to a fishing guide I never met before.”
“Hey, it’s your day. I’m interested,” I said.
“Good, cause I’m not stopping. Don’t expect subtlety or politeness from a man who’s on his third set of hair. Funny, it was my sister really who made this happen. I just keep going back to the people who did things for me, who helped me, and I wonder if I did anything like that for anybody else.
“My sister Annie, she’s brilliant. Really, from the start. They couldn’t skip her ahead fast enough. Finally, age 14 or so, they just left her in high school and let her do her own thing, and she’d read and write and study so much some days she’d stay home. She’d skip school to study. Her friends would stop me in the hall, say “Where’s Annie?” I’d say, she’s home working, they’d nod and go on. Everybody knew it. From the start my folks worked their asses off to save up for her college. Neither of them had been near a college, they didn’t get what it was, what it took, except it was expensive. I guess we didn't have counselors then. I was in school, counseling was the coach saying 'cut that out or I'll run you till you puke.' Worked, too.
"I remember my dad, saying it was our part to get in somewhere, it was their part to pay. I don’t know how much they saved, but it must have been a lot of money. She’s sixteen, 1962, comes home with a letter from Harvard. They gave her a full ride, then a full ride to graduate school, Christ, they were waiting in line to give her rides anywhere she wanted to go. Duke. Oxford. She’s at Bowdoin now, in Maine--they’ve got some great fishing up there—teacher, a poet, famous writer. Her poems are in textbooks. 1962, free ride to Harvard, and my folks have fifteen years worth of saving hard. Maybe twenty grand. 1962. A brand new Fairlane cost about 1500 bucks.”
He looked across the meadow towards the mountains, a suggestion in the haze.
“My tuition at UM was about a grand a year in 1968, and I only lasted three months before transferring to the University of Saigon anyway. My dad told me a few years ago, when he was dying like I’m dying now, he told me Annie asked them to spend the money on us, on themselves and my brother and me. She told them that if us boys didn’t have passions, we’d wind up drugged out or dead. She felt like we’d sacrificed for her, and I guess we had though I never really knew it--that’s how strong they were.
“So my dad takes us down to Schneider’s, the best shop in the state, a two-hour drive. He says this: ‘You can have whatever you want in this store, right now. Pick it out.’ I was twelve years old. I remember, my brother had his arm in a cast. We didn’t believe it, and finally Dad had to have the clerk start picking stuff out. Honestly, he’s listening to this clerk talk over two rods or three. Each. I was twelve. He spent nearly a thousand dollars on fly gear that day, on everything. He spent a whole year’s rent on us in one day in the best flyfishing store in the state. Unbelievable. And he trusted us completely. He said only one thing: this is a gift from your sister, and you must honor this gift.
“Can you believe that? So here I am”--fingertip gesture again--“and I get this sense that I haven’t honored that gift, that I’m going to go out squealing and whining. So I said, on this river, that if I just had the time I’d make my life right.”
We were silent a long time, fading out of the meadow into a set of forest rapids and riffles, bedrock ledges here, moving water which tilted the boat forward a time or two. He watched the spruces slide by, followed a current seam with his eye, looking deeper in the river than there was.
I had become comfortable again. Guiding was being what the client needed--servant, waiter, friend, teacher. Listener was a new one, but not that different really. Time was short.
“I got the time,” he said softly, then paused. I set up on a little compression drop, wagged the boat through and let it wash left past some big rocks.
“Medicine got it for me, I guess. I’ve had two years, near enough, and the other day I realized that I had, you know, honored my promise, made myself something of the man my father was, something of the person my sister and mother are. I haven’t fished in 20 months. I swore on this river I wouldn’t fish, even though I had the ‘six months to live’ golden ticket. And I didn’t. I took care of business, finished things. Goddamn. I can hardly believe it. There’s a lot more to do, sure now, but I did the main things.” He was talking to himself.
We turned the bend above Styles Creek and he perked up, watching the landscape. The confluence was a beautiful dark triangle hole with blending seams and a backwater full of cress. A couple of heads poked up in the soft water.
I looked at him, but he only smiled slowly, looking off across the flat confluence bar. When he spoke it was quietly, out and up toward the pasture-edge and the scrub sycamores that lined the river.
“Nah. Let her roll. I’m going to rest a bit.”
We slipped along, washing at angles across the channel, gathering water as the sun gathered sky across the valley. He slept a good hour. I was worried about finishing too early so I hung up in a shady side pocket near Kettle Creek and stretched my legs on the bank, drank some water, and watched the water run for half an hour before I noticed again that he was awake.
The river had calmed into the midday stillness, no bugs, direct sun. It was hot in the open but delicious in the shade. He was awake, looking away from me down the riverbank. I knew what he was seeing--the lovely perspective of the verge of a troutstream, the jumbled round rock dry and white then black wet, the wheels of pocketwater extending, curving into distance. To me it’s that changing moving edge that somehow captures the promise of fishing--forever of motion against the now of permanent rock, trout between. I don't know what he saw. I caught myself hoping I never knew.
He spoke suddenly, not looking at me. “I need a hand with something.”
I tried not to pause, had to. Possibilities made me tense my lips, then say, “Sure.”
He had me hook up above the broad gravel bar opposite Silas Creek. He tried to stand out of the boat but couldn’t raise his leg above the steep gunwale, then couldn’t brace a knee with confidence to swing over. I waded up beside him and finally took him under the arms and hoisted him out, turning him to his feet in six inches of water, his face on my shoulder. He was light and gangly, sour smelling.
He stood a moment, one hand on the gunwale, feet spavined on the round river rocks. Then I took his arm and we walked carefully out the bar, down the slope in a pillowing foot of water, bed-boulders fading down to goose-egg shingle then the flat tongue of the bar, regular drift gravel under six inches of braided current.
He settled to his knees there, one hand in the water, soaking jeans and overtopping boots. His forward hand pressed into the gravel, and I fixed on the water riding up his forearm, the wet stain creeping up the sleeve, curling around lower on the downstream side, little displaced grains of sand visible circulating in the swirl where the flow was temporarily reoriented around his fragile warm wrist.
He released my arm with the downstream hand; now, both hands in the water, head down, almost to the surface of the river, then to it. He drank, maybe, or spoke into the water, clarity spilling around that eroded old/young face, then almost prone he pressed his head sideways under the flow, face upstream away from me, immersing himself prostrate a steady half-minute before he raised his head up and breathed deeply, soaked now but for a neat wispy tonsure on the back of his scalp.
He was stunned and shivering when I got him back into the boat. I broke out my storm gear, got him layered down, and cranked up the little propane stove. He chose tea over soup, and just held it to his face it as we went slipping downriver. It was a weird quarter-hour before he finally spoke.
“Damn--that river’s cold.”
“You scared me,” I said. “I didn’t know you were going to drown yourself.”
“Yeah--try to explain that to Kyle. Sorry--something got ahold of me there. At first the river felt warm again, like that day I first stepped in it,” he said. His voice seemed distant, weary.
“That was your ritual, your thank-you note?” I said. He angled his head at the skepticism.
“Yeah, well, I guess so. No offense, but I don’t give much of a damn about what you think. It’s one of the luxuries of wasting away. One’s sense of propriety goes first. Second, maybe,” he said.
I rowed in silence, long easy controlling strokes, and tried to see the anger that was turning me, pushing me around like a contrary current. The inconvenience of it annoyed me, even though it was fitting if I looked at it softly and thoughtfully. I felt trapped by this smug skeleton, somehow confined by his tone and the way he’d let me lift him out of the boat, then lift him back in. I couldn't pretend any more to a bedrock happily-ever-after with a boat full of anglers who fished so well they didn’t need a guide.
“I’m sorry,” I said, not thinking. “It’s just weird. Being a fishing guide, I hardly ever have to really do or see anything. I’m sheltered by my clients’ inabilities. If they know how to fish it’s easy because they let me stay out of the way. If they can’t fish, which is more usual, then I can blame them for what goes wrong, call what goes right luck, and be done. Now you’re here, saying all this, and not fishing at all. I guess it’d be a lot easier if you’d just take a few casts.”
He laughed, facing away, still reclining now but with his face toward the open space of the pastures.
“I'm paying. I can do what I want."